This is what ‘the great and the
good’ in the business world will not be discussing during the annual talk-fest
at the Swiss luxury resort
Pepe Escobar | Asia Times |
opinion
For billions of people, the
Groucho Marx rule applies when talking about Davos. This is the exclusive club,
which meets in the luxury Swiss resort each year to discuss the global business
environment.
Groucho, of course, has been
immortalized along with the rest of the Marx Brothers in the zany Hollywood
movies of the 1930s, such as A Night a the Opera, A Day at the Races and Animal
Crackers.
In one quick-fire response, he
joked: “I sent the club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t
want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’.”
Well, to start off with those
billions of people would not get past the bouncers, because the self-defined
World Economic Forum is about exclusion. Yet even if, by divine design, they
were handed free passes, what would be the point?
The austerity mantra holds sway
over large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff
maelstrom and the Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami –
devaluation of the yen at all costs.
On the other hand, growth does
apply to parts of the BRICS (Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of emerging nations and selected
members of Next 11.
Certainly, Indonesia, Mexico, the
Philippines, Turkey, South Korea and Vietnam fall into this category in N-11, a
BRICS-like organization.
So, what is the point of spending
the GDP of a sub-Saharan country trekking to the Alps to Davos for a mere
blabber fest, when basic membership plus access to private sessions at the
summit cost a whopping US$245,000?
For instance, the slopes of
Jackson Hole, where the annual central bank symposium is held in
Wyoming, are way cooler.
In comparison, Davos is
essentially double-dip land. On one side, we have ‘Bad for Labor’, with
millions in the West thrown into an unemployment hell or suffering from a wages
freeze. On the other side, we have ‘Good for Capital’, with companies
flush with cash.
Yet the result is uncertainty,
all over again. Quite simply, more “robust” companies are just not
investing. Why? Because there is no demand. That is the “price” of the
austerity mantra, and there is no evidence that the business, financial and
government suits in Davos will address the drama.
After all, since the 1990s, the
summit has always been about hardcore globalization and its prime spin-off –
the absolute marketization of everything in life.
To get to the bottom of it, CEOs,
bankers and techno-bureaucrats would have to engage in an in-depth
discussion of hardcore neoliberalism.
To do that, they would have to
bring in David
Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has been
teaching Karl Marx’s “Capital: Critique of Political Economy” for more than
40 years.
They would have to hold global
banking to account. They would also have to consign austerity to the dustbin of
history, and level the playing field between capital and labor. Of course,
that will not happen.
Still, this year’s Davos theme is
“Resilient Dynamism.” As a definition of the current woes of turbo-capitalism,
a five-year-old in a favela, or slum, in Rio could come up with
something more meaningful.
But then, Davos is a one-trick
pony. “Resilience” remains a euphemism for the ever-expanding markets and low
pay for workers syndrome. In a nutshell, globalization driven by huge
multinational corporations.
We should scrap “Resilience” as
the name of their game is “Inequality.” Davos, of course, does not do
“inequality.”
In a study released
by UC Berkeley, the wealth of the top 1% of Americans accrued by
11.6% in 2010, while for the other 99% it was a mere 0.2%. This is what is at
the heart of hardcore neoliberalism and capitalist.
Davos should be discussing how a
key segment of elites concocted the Wall Street-provoked financial crash. That
was only ‘virtual’ business, but it was not ‘virtual’ national governments that
had to intervene afterward to pick up the bill and bail out the
banks.
No, I am afraid “Resilient
Dynamism” will not do for Davos. But it is a good definition of China. While
European and American elites accrue their capital to contain Beijing’s advance
in Africa and Asia, China’s interventionism is of the business kind. It is a
case of building roads, not wars.
Still, the question Davos refuses
to ask remains: Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind,
from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system
of relations spawned by capitalism?
Stay tuned for that one.
Photo: The curtain has gone up on
the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos. Photo: Reuters /
Denis Balibouse
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